I Don't Want to Go to the NIS
"Please save me, Yuyeon! Please!"
I stared up at Yuyeon with tears brimming in my eyes and screamed like I was begging for my life. Faced with my desperate, over-the-top reaction, Yuyeon couldn't hide her bewilderment. She blinked at me as if I'd lost my mind.
"Uh... Nabi? I never said a word about killing you or hurting you, so why are you—"
"You just said you'd call the NIS! I don't want to get hauled off and turned into a lab experiment, waaah!"
Fat tears rolled down my cheeks as I sobbed. In my head I was already strapped to an operating table, staring down a freezing-cold scalpel. My life felt like it was hanging by a thread.
"Na... Nabi."
The pitiful, heartbreaking look I was giving her from the corner of the room, combined with this tiny, soft little body that mercilessly triggered every protective instinct she had, hit her with perfect synergy.
Her resolve crumbled under the sheer patheticness of it all. Yuyeon hastily killed the phone screen that still showed the NIS number and stopped what she was doing. She took one long, deep breath, then fixed her eyes straight on me.
"Nabi. Are you really, truly my cat Nabi?"
"Yeah. I'm really Nabi."
"You're not some unidentified monster pretending to be Nabi and scamming me, right?"
"I'm real, I swear! I remember everything you've done alone in this house! Just yesterday you pulled that pink electric massager out of the drawer and star—"
"Ahh! Nabi, stop! Stop it! Okay, okay! I completely believe you're my cat Nabi, so please just shut your mouth!"
The second I started airing her black history at full volume, Yuyeon's face went scarlet and she clapped both hands over my mouth in a panic. Only then did I finally breathe a sigh of relief.
"Thanks, Yuyeon!"
After the storm passed, a strangely awkward atmosphere settled over the room. We just stared at each other, trading sheepish glances. Yuyeon still looked like she couldn't quite believe any of this was real; she let out a hollow little laugh and muttered,
"Still... I never in my wildest dreams thought beast-people actually existed in this world."
I nodded so hard I almost gave myself whiplash. Beast-people, werewolves, aliens—those were creatures that only lived as CGI in fantasy novels and Hollywood movies. They weren't supposed to just pop up in ordinary modern society.
But maybe because I myself had become the star of this completely unrealistic phenomenon, every time I looked in the mirror a wave of absurdity and an indescribable sense of wrongness washed over me. Even though I was clearly a beast-person, it somehow still felt like I wasn't one.
"Anyway... how does your body feel, Nabi? Are you still hurting?"
Just yesterday she'd watched me shiver and ache all over with a cold, so the worry was still fresh. Yuyeon carefully studied my face as she asked.
"Yeah, I'm completely fine! It's like I never even got sick!"
"That's a relief..."
Yuyeon pressed a hand to her chest and exhaled a deep sigh of relief. Then another short silence fell. If we just kept staring blankly at each other like this, precious time would keep slipping away for no good reason. Eventually I recognized how serious the situation was and opened my mouth first, voice solemn.
"I... I can't make it without you, Yuyeon."
"Huh? What do you mean?"
"Look at me right now. If I go outside looking like this, people are definitely going to scream that I'm a monster and all hell will break loose."
"Yeah... you're right. Even I, who see you every day, almost fainted because I couldn't believe it at first."
If I stepped out into the world with these cat ears and tail still attached, there was a one-hundred-percent chance some citizen or cop would report me and I'd get shipped straight down to a secret underground NIS lab.
She must have caught the way my expression was slowly sinking into gloom, because Yuyeon soon put on a warm, determined smile and patted my shoulder.
"Don't worry, Nabi! Unni will take full responsibility for you!"
"Really?"
"Yeah! Just trust Unni. I know exactly what our Nabi is scared of and what she's fretting about!"
"Thanks, Yuyeon!"
Emotion surged up and I burst into tears all over again as I dove straight into her arms. Yuyeon gently held me close, carefully stroking my hair and my twitching cat ears. Then she suddenly paused as if something had just occurred to her.
"But Nabi... do you remember everything that happened when you were a cat?"
"Yeah. Every single bit of it, without missing a thing."
"Ah... right..."
Yuyeon gave me an awkward smile.
Of course she did. All this time she'd shown me every last scrap of her good side and her not-so-good side without holding anything back.
She'd believed with absolute certainty that I was just an ordinary cat who couldn't talk and only blinked at her, so she'd acted without the slightest restraint... and I, for my part, had gotten an extremely vivid eyeful of the embarrassing self-comfort session she'd performed on the bed yesterday.
"Um... Nabi? About what I did in the room yesterday... it would be really nice if you could just cleanly forget the whole thing. Is that okay?"
Yuyeon's face had gone as red as a beet as she pleaded in a voice so tiny it was practically a mosquito's whine. I couldn't help smiling at how cute she looked.
"Don't worry. I'll never tell a soul, Yuyeon!"
"R-really? Promise you'll take it to the grave?"
"Yeah!"
I nodded firmly at her words. I fully intended to carry Yuyeon's secret with me to the grave.
And just like that, through sheer dramatic luck, I successfully talked Yuyeon down.
I didn't get sold off to some NIS basement or human-experimentation facility. As long as I never set foot outside the door of Yuyeon's studio apartment, there was zero chance the world would ever find out I was a beast-person.
It felt a little mean to say this out loud, but... the truth was Yuyeon didn't have a single real-life friend.
In all the time since I'd come to live here, I had never once seen a guest visit her tiny place.
To Yuyeon, "friends" meant only the internet people she talked to through a monitor; actual friends she could meet face-to-face in the real world simply didn't seem to exist. So every possible leak for the secret was sealed off at the source.
There was, however, one brand-new, massively inconvenient problem that came with becoming a beast-person who had a human body.
"Kyaaah! You're so cute, Nabi! How can you be this soft?!"
"Uwaaah... Yuyeon, that tickles..."
"When I touch your ears like this they're all fluffy~ and the feel of your tail is completely addictive! Our Nabi really is the best in the world!"
Yuyeon had started freely fondling my ears and tail. It already felt good when I touched them myself; I couldn't even imagine how much better it felt for someone else.
"To think I actually considered sending a cry-inducingly adorable Nabi like this to the NIS...! Unni committed a capital crime. I'm so sorry~!"
"It's fine, Yuyeon."
It was already in the past.
If she had actually dialed the number and handed me over lock, stock, and barrel, I would have cursed her for the rest of my life. But in the end she put the phone down because I begged her, so magnanimous me decided to be the bigger person and forgive her.
There was just one thing neither of us had anticipated.
"Ah... we've only got two packs of ramen left in the cupboard?"
"Eek..."
Becoming a beast-person meant that this tiny studio apartment now had one more freeloader... no, one more mouth to feed. Exactly that.
Maybe it was because I was a beast-person now, but my stomach had gotten bigger. Cat food no longer filled me up. Not that she'd been feeding me cat food in the first place.
So whenever Yuyeon sat down for a meal, I inevitably ended up quietly sliding into a seat at the table and sharing her food.
I vaguely remembered skimming some internet community post she used to read.
When a household gains one more member, the monthly food budget easily jumps by at least three to five hundred thousand won. That was the terrifying claim. And people said a normal family with two kids regularly spent over a million won a month on food alone, didn't they?
"Hngh... this month's living expenses are already razor-thin..."
Yuyeon made a miserable face as she stared into the empty cupboard.
I felt so guilty I couldn't even meet her eyes. It wasn't like I was some huge glutton who ate mountains of food, but even so, compared to when I'd been a tiny cat the food costs had skyrocketed. That was an undeniable fact.
"Haa... maybe I really do have to go work a short-term warehouse gig this weekend... I so don't want to..."
"I'm sorry, Yuyeon..."
"No. It's not your fault, Nabi. It's my fault for not earning enough money."
But Yuyeon's worries didn't last long.
Not long after that, I figured out how to control the strange energy flowing through my body... and I completely mastered the miraculous method of freely switching, at will, between my beast-person form and my original tiny cat form!